-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 James Tremblay wrote:
ok, but historically since 10.0 we have introduced new technology (because we are an engineering distro, not a packaging distro i.e. Ubuntu) that I would not expose the first timer to, in the sense of learning how to overcome the problems that arose from that new technology i.e. the new gnome and kde interfaces, and the updater issues.
What "new GNOME and KDE interfaces" ? KDE 3.5.6 ? The new start menus ?
If opensuse wants to target the soho/homeuser then lets have an LTS version, lets gold master 10.2 without the zenupdater , with gnomebaker, with wireless drivers and their instructions and support it for 3 years like Ubuntu. Other
It's not because Ubuntu does an "LTS" that it is the best nor the most viable model. Canonical has still everything to prove wrt their support. Furthermore, LTS is not free, nor is SLED. Actually, if it's a desktop you're after, SLED is less expensive than Ubuntu LTS. And, at the very least, the SUSE engineers have proven their capabilities in the past wrt support, which is not yet the case for the few full-time employees of Canonical.
wise it really isn't for the first timer to have to struggle with drivers and codecs and updators and looking for everyday applications and then in 18 months have to update it by reinstalling everything to continue to get security updates.
If feature-stability and long lifetime is what you're looking for, buy SLED for a few bucks. If you want evolution, new features, improvements, go for openSUSE. But that doesn't mean it has to be "beta-quality", unstable nor anything else.
Wireless configuration support and the network manager are still unstable especially when registering to the customer center during installation and lots of people don't rewire their homes, they buy a wireless router and wireless cards and pay someone to set it up or call Dell to walk them through it. Are we ready to compete with that ? No , i don't think so , we would need
Sure but that's not any different from other Linux distributions. openSUSE is pretty good wrt hardware detection and easy of installation IMO. Blame the wireless card vendors, they're making an awful mess out of chipsets, incompatible devices with the same model number, closed specs, etc...
that 900 system in place, we would need the update.opensuse.org to be set up as the default update channel in yast( even if registering fails) and have it redirect to other mirrors, we would need software.opensuse.org to be the default application source for add-ons (like the multiverse) and a
The build service repositories (software.opensuse.org) just contain too much software -- having it split up into many repositories as now is the right model. You wouldn't want experimental xorg73 packages to show up in the same repository as the latest Firefox package. update.opensuse.org makes sense though.
support.opensuse.org forum\KB to even exist. These things are all being
http://suseforums.net/ http://suselinuxsupport.de/ http://opensuse.us/
discussed and worked on but we can't put the cart before the horse and start extolling the virtues of our distro to the homeuser, when in reality we the enthusiast are the only ones that can make it all work with a little guidance from friends in obscure places like the irc forums. Some one needs to start
IRC "forums", "obscure" ?
consolidating the places we get help from on an intuitive location like "support.opensuse.org" because the masses are used to the host domain having these kinds of pages. our front page is difficult to navigate because the things homeusers are looking to find aren't what we look for when we go
File bugs for those suggestions, give feedback to the web designers of the site when they make a proposal on the list (but not hidden in a large post on this list ;))
there, even software.opensuse.org has changed recently and it is obscure even to me how to search for packages in the different repos. I was looking to see
True, it's still lacking a lot on the end-user interface, but efforts have been concentrated on the packager side of things up to now (which is even more important in the first place). Hopefully there will be some sort of interface for users soon. As for finding packages, Benjamin Weber's webpin is currently the best option.
if we had a 10.2 package for NBD and had to go to google to find it on opensuse.org, this is unacceptable to the novice. So that novice goes looking for a click and run distro like Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is no "click and run distro", it's by no means easier to set up and use than openSUSE. The only thing that's better with Ubuntu is the package manager. Idealizing Ubuntu as being perfect and not having any issues is ridiculous.
No our structure is still to immature to sell it to the homeuser masses, therefore I agree with Justin and Bruce and Ted, opensuse is the techies version.
Not to say there aren't a lot of things to improve, but it isn't a "techies version" more than SLED nor Ubuntu nor Fedora nor ... cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGOsTOr3NMWliFcXcRAni9AJ9oTozkG7Vddd7kuwCyK632LwwHrgCgq7Ry oBUb/GKfHSHbYOwg6Aq6fe0= =8cYl -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org